Jenni Avins at Quartz breaks down the cost of getting married today using data from The Knot. Adjusting for inflation, a wedding 80-years ago cost $6,481. Today’s weddings cost $29,858. Of course, this data isn’t quite reliable. The Knot’s survey of 13,000 brides focused on UPM brides who frequent that website. Still, that number is astounding.
Our wedding wasn’t cheap even though I cut a lot of corners. I found a seamstress who made my dress for a fraction of the cost of a dress at a wedding store. We backpacked through Europe on our honeymoon vacation, rather than hitting a resort in the Caribbean. We bought our rings from a front for the Russian mafia in the Diamond District. Still, it was costly. We did some dumb things, like hiring a band instead of a DJ. We hired a tempermental artist to take the photographs, rather than a standard wedding photographer. We cared too much about the quality of the food.
It was a great wedding. People had a lot of fun. But, looking back on things, was it really worth blowing all that cash on one night? Some people earn back the costs of the wedding with cash from the wedding guests, but we didn’t. Too many poor, socially stupid grad students in our circle. Many didn’t give us a card.
One friend of mine had a small ceremony with just the immediate family. Her nuptuals were witnessed by twenty people at most. Her father gave her $20,000 — the amount he would have shelled out for the wedding. And she invested it in a Vanguard account.
We’ve made some good financial decisions over the years, and some poor decisions (Hello PhDs). The wedding extravaganza was perhaps a bad one. I loved my pretty dress and the vacation. I would do that again. Watching my husband tear up as my father walked me down the aisle was a perfect moment. But all those guests, the loud band, and the silly hair-do? Should have skipped all that.
Apt. 11d 
At a personal level, wedding cost seems to me like pretty much of a personal choice. I don’t remember quite what our wedding cost, but I think it was around $15,000 (that’s not counting the honeymoon). That was 20 years ago. We had a good time, so I have never regretted the cost.
At a social level, marriage these days is pretty much confined to the top half of the income distribution, so it doesn’t surprise me that weddings cost more, in real terms and as a percentage of household income. (That’s assuming the two sets of figures in the linked article are really comparable: more sophisticated sociological study would be needed to be sure of a definitive comparison.)
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“At a personal level, wedding cost seems to me like pretty much of a personal choice.”
Yes.
“(That’s assuming the two sets of figures in the linked article are really comparable: more sophisticated sociological study would be needed to be sure of a definitive comparison.)”
I personally doubt very, very much that a Depression-era couple 80 years ago would spend the equivalent of $6k today. That’s very, very, very dubious.
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We spent $10 on the license, $30 on the venue (Rotunda Room of the Chicago Cultural Center) and my mother spent about $1500 (including tip and alcohol) on a very nice wedding breakfast at the Pump Room in Chicago, as well as a orchid wreath I wore in my hair. I think I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a pretty dress and my husband wore a suit he already owned.
If we add the “rehearsal dinner” the night before (another couple grand for an excellent meal at the Ritz Carlton hotel for family) – It still came to less than $4000; most of that spent, obviously, on two exceptionally nice meals for ~ a dozen people each time.
I’ve never regretted not spending more, or not having a larger wedding. It was lovely and we’ve been happy for almost 14 years now. 🙂 We also didn’t take a honeymoon until our 10 year anniversary – we couldn’t agree on a location when we first were married and decided not to waste money on a vacation if we weren’t super excited about it. Had a lovely 2 week “honeymoon” for our 10 year anniversary that cost about the same as our original wedding and have been going back to our honeymoon location at least once a year since then.
My best friend spent about $35k on her wedding for ~ 150 people. $25k of that was food, flowers, alcohol and music on the day. $5k on wedding dress/tuxedo/misc. $5k on honeymoon. 5 years later she regrets deeply spending that $25k on one day celebration, and she thinks of all the other things she and her husband could have spent that money on. Though, she doesn’t regret spending the money on the dress/shoes/hair/etc nor the money spent on the honeymoon.
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My wedding might have cost a few thousand dollars. We got married on a family friend’s farm in upstate NY. The farm is really important to me and my family. My dad’s ashes are buried there.
I had a $100 dress from Jessica McClintock. My husband’s suit cost $10 from a thrift shop. My mom and I made the food (back in those days she was a caterer). We splurged on wine from a vineyard that happens to share my name. We also bought champagne (uh, sparkling wine, I guess) from a local vineyard.
Our friend made the cake. It was lopsided but covered in lilacs for decorations. We had a DJ who, we joke, played Billy Idol’s Mony Mony constantly. My friends G and M played flute and violin for the march down the aisle, which was really just a white runner on grass. We were married next to a lilac bush in late May. About 75 people were there. We had little disposable cameras on each table, but since my husband is a photographer, he had a few photographer friends there, and one took some formal portraits and gave my husband the negs, which is *big* if you know photogs. That was our gift from him.
Ah memories. 22 years married now.
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Courthouse wedding. $100 for the license and judge, $70 for a new wrap dress, about $300 to take our witnesses and their SOs out to dinner. No regrets on my end although I would have been open to a bigger affair if it had been important to my partner.
Among my friends, those with the bigger weddings ended up with worse post-wedding blues. So much time, energy and thought went into the planning the big day and after all of that they’re just…..married. They all got over it eventually but it’s something I rarely hear addressed as a negative side effect of putting on a big to-do.
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My wedding was also inexpensive, though there were a lot of guests. It was held in a community center (the backup rain venue, which we ended up using). My mothers friends cooked potluck for the event. My clothes (and the attendant’s) clothes were <$300. We had photos taken by friends (no real photography). I did not do much of the planning (my mother did). Our wedding was one of the firsts in our ethnic community in my home town, and thus, many of the needs, vegetarian food, ethnic food, clothes, white horses (:-) were not available, so we made do, and costs were limited by what was available (there was no expensive caterer available, for example, no easy venues that would allow us to bring our own food, . . .)
We did not cut down on guests. At the time, I thought the guests were the thing I'd cut out. But, in retrospect, I realize the community building that weddings provide. They can bring people from many parts of your life (and, in our case, my parents) together and bond people together.
By the time my younger sister got married, a wedding industry was available to provide everything but the white horse commercially (and in some cities, you can get that, too), and that was good, too.
My favorite wedding memory was the wedding we attended in Tuscany, of Italian friends. Of course, it was intertwined with a trip in Tuscany that was as idyllic as any such trip can be, but it also brought families and friends together, creating connections that have lasted for many years. That wedding was held in the groom's father's home town (no one in the family lives there any more, and it is a small Tuscan village) and taught me a lot about the role weddings can play in keeping families and friends connected.
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If the bride is visibly pregnant, do they have to use a different color of horses?
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The horse is for the boy. He gets to ride it to the wedding. So, I don’t think the natal status of the bride matters for the color of the horse.
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I’ve been to a couple of “marching around the ceremonial fire” weddings. Also, one with a henna ceremony on the third day of a week-long party.
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In rural China, the goal is for the bride to be about 2-3 months pregnant at the wedding. Not far enough along that it shows, but far enough that it’s probably going to take. In some regions, if the woman doesn’t produce a child (preferably a son) within 2 years, the in-laws push for a divorce.
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Ooh, you summed up my view, in the “related articles” that appeared for me under this post:
https://apt11d.com/2011/11/the-mysterious-stink-and-weddings/
“These events remind us that life isn’t about the mysterious stink in the fridge. That can wait. It’s about old friends linking arms for photographs, flower girls twirling their skirts on the dance floor, vivid flashbacks of our own wedding, and the passage of time.”
If someone doesn’t spend the money to have the party and everyone cuts out most of the guests (in favor of the hair?) then we don’t have those events any more. Of course, no one should have to have parties for people they don’t want.
Someone once quoted Judith Martin as saying that weddings should be a heightened version of your own regular social life (rather than an attempt to imitate another life, say, wedding of royalty or celebrities, I guess, now). So, if your social life involves potlucks, or nice dinners, or dancing at a club, choosing a wedding celebration that is an extension of those activities, that one already enjoys, is the right way to do a wedding.
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Yeah, I really like the Judith Martin quote as a way to stay grounded in reality.
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I forgot I wrote that. Gee, I’ve written a lot over the years. Sometimes, it weirds me out.
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My parents paid for our wedding and we probably spent way too much. My husband has a huge ethnic family so we had over 300 people. It was my first wedding but his second, and I remember feeling really conflicted about that — feeling like I deserved to be a princess because it was my first and presumably only wedding, whereas all of his family had already been through this once before. I pictured them thinking things like “I wonder if this one will last.” (It has, for nearly 20 years.) We didn’t have a honeymoon because we had met while working abroad and were sick of travelling. I also had this wedding planner who handled all the details because I worked abroad until 3 weeks before the wedding.
I read somewhere that it’s all Pinterest’s fault that people are spending so much — I know that my sixteen year old daughter and all her friends and all my nieces already have pages on Pinterest for the purposes of planning their weddings. I pity the guy who gets to come face to face with my daughter’s pent-up aspirations for a day that she may have been planning for well over ten years by the time she gets married! Right now, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend but she has the cake picked out, and the shoes, and the dress, and the honeymoon and the invitations and the little mason jar candles, etc. etc. etc.
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There’s a really good chapter in Dave Ramsey and his daughter’s book Smart Money Smart Kids on taming the wedding dragon. (He’s seen two daughters through the process.) I like the method of just handing the kids a check and telling them that’s all there’s going to be, and they can pocket any leftovers. The figure I’ve been holding in my head is $10k, although by the time that rolls around, $15k might be much more reasonable.
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We married 5 years ago and I still can access the shared google doc called “Wedding Tears,” detailing the budget for our “expensive” RI wedding for 100 guests. Given how “little” all of you have spent, I’m embarrassed to divulge the total cost (more than the average Laura notes). Because Husband is a man of humor there is a line item called “Cat Tax” at .08. It still makes me laugh. Regrets? Not being able to invite more people (food costs for 100 people were 13k) and Husband regrets not having a band (we used an iPod). While it took some time to pay off the wedding debt, I don’t regret the cost, but how we paid for it (credit cards). I’m of the “you only get married once (and damn I was old, 39!), and you only live once” mindset. I think that you have to be at peace with whatever choices you make. We also spent a butt-load of money on the honeymoon to French Polynesia; I think maybe we could’ve spent less on this, and taken less time (two weeks is a LONG time for a beach vacation, even on three islands).
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I’ve recently been reading of wedding scenes (in Betsy’s wedding to Joe, in the Betsy/Tacy books), of weddings in the LM Montgomery’s books. The weddings are usually at home, the extended family prepares the food (even when the guests number up in the 100s). And, people marry quietly (in the children’s books, never because of shotgun marriages, but I’m guessing that would have played a role), with few guests, when there is either no time or money. And since married life (living together, . . . ) can’t begin until the marriage, they don’t wait, to plan the wedding.
I think it’s true, that one reason for higher wedding costs is the extent to which weddings/marriage have become UMC traditions, as Y81 mentions. But, I also think that there’s an increase in middle class aping of traditions and practices of those who are much more wealthy. I blame television (as I have in the past, for housing, and other assumptions of what constitutes a middle-income life).
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I clicked through to the link, and, is it really fair to compare Knot weddings of 2013 to a sociology study of weddings during the depression?
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Laura said:
“Some people earn back the costs of the wedding with cash from the wedding guests, but we didn’t. Too many poor, socially stupid grad students in our circle. Many didn’t give us a card.”
Funny!
We did a “Catholic elopement” after one set of parents got weird and said they weren’t going to attend. So that nuked my vision of a HUGE hometown wedding, with every great aunt and second cousin I could muster. (We got engaged about three months after meeting, and our wedding date was about 8 months after we met, and we were in our early/mid 20s, which, as age and experience now suggests to me, is very likely to produce a conniption fit among one’s relatives. They eventually got over it.) We got married in 1998 in the town where we were in grad school and I believe our total budget was around $600, which covered two gold wedding bands (probably way more expensive today), a new dress for me (a bit of a mistake on my part–not enough time to do a good job), a bouquet, a store cake, a check to the parish, all necessary licenses, and a festive home-cooked lunch at my studio apartment for us and our handful of guests (quiche and salads). I was initially a little bummed out by not getting the Big Fat wedding of my dreams, but it was OK, and I now feel lucky to have been spared the stress and expense it would have involved.
One set of parents was THRILLED by getting off easy financially, so we got some very nice cash gifts from that side of the wedding as well as a used Queen mattress set from some friends (ick! but also much needed). We turned a small profit on the wedding, I believe, and the cash gifts funded a necessary IKEA spree (we were moving from two studio apartments into a single large 1-bedroom). I got married literally not owning a spoon (I was coming from a year in a furnished apartment after two years abroad). My husband brought at most three spoons from his bachelor apartment, if I’m remembering correctly.
At the time, I did tell myself that we’d do a reception in my hometown (as per Judith Martin), but that never happened. It was OK. We actually did get an awesome delayed honeymoon a year after our wedding. It was a combined see-sister-in-Germany/do academic work in Poland/see Vienna in transit/see Polish grandmas/fun in Krakow trip. It was nearly a month, and very inexpensive, given the Eastern European locations and all the family hospitality and the working vacation aspect.
Our next big thing is a 20th anniversary trip, which we need to start plotting the childcare for. We’re thinking Quebec City…
http://www.quebecregion.com/en/
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Hmm, de gustibus non est disputandum. I like fancy parties much better than I like travel. We’ve never taken an anniversary trip, but I was thinking–idly, because it doesn’t happen for another four years–that maybe we should have a big party for our 25th. Big like a black tie dinner for 50 people. I don’t know if this would be a good idea.
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Sounds like a great idea! There’s an Anne of Green Gables story set around a 25th anniversary celebration (in which the couple invited their old wedding guests).
And, a fancy party is a heightened version of some people’s lives, just as fancy dinners are of some, and travel others.
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I love black tie!! FUN. Our wedding was “black tie redux” (essentially giving men some options not to have to wear a tux); it was kind of elegant but no too fancy.
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I’ve never been away from all of the kids with my husband overnight for a trip since we started having kids, so the away-from-home-leave-kids-with-grandma part is very exotic and attractive. We’ve had lots of parties over the years.
I kind of wanted to do Paris (even for just a couple of days–somehow I’ve never been). Prague is another option. We have lots of time to get this together.
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We did a “delayed” honeymoon about a year after our marriage, too. San Francisco in May–gorgeous. But really, we often ascribe to wedding/anniversary travel we would have done anyway.
y81, I don’t understand preferring parties to travel. A good party will last what, 6 hours? Travel lasts much longer. (I can handle only 8 days at a time, but others can do longer trips.)
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As someone who hasn’t gotten married, I am grateful for the nice weddings I’ve attended (to which I have always brought a gift, even as a grad student!) It is definitely a nice way to keep in touch with a community and then have your communities connect. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about a friend’s friend for years and then was able to finally meet them at a wedding – or twenty years after a wedding, met that friend again and said, “Oh yes, I remember you from the wedding.” Once I was at a conference and re-met my best grad school friend’s brother-in-law, and we were able to mock the groom (now husband of 15 years) together.
I also believe in throwing your parents (or yourselves) anniversary parties – an at-home one with 25 or so close friends for the 25th, and more recently, for the 50th, a big brunch at a rented hall for about 100. If you don’t do these kinds of things, it’ll only be the funerals you remember down the road. Judith Martin is right: it doesn’t have to be upscaled from what you’d usually do, but if you’d ever be willing to spend, say, $100 to entertain and feed a close friend or family member, why not do it for all of them at once?
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Ours was the only wedding for either sets of parents so I’d figured out early on that we were going moderately big. My dream wedding was a backyard affair with a couple of coolers full of beer, pop, wine coolers and the like, accompanying a table of picnic staples such as Ruffles chip with French Onion dip. I did not get that but our parents, relatives and some friends did get a fancy night out in northern Mississauga so there’s something!
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We were married 20 years ago, and my parents gave us a sum of money to cover a medium wedding. We had a smallish wedding (100 people) and used the rest of the money on newlywed travel to exotic places. We’re about to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and we still love to travel. So worked out well for us.
We were married at the chapel at Arlington National Cemetary at 10 am and had our reception at Ft. Myer. Basically my entire wedding planning experience was a 5 minute meeting with the military wedding planner: “Would you like package A or package B?” Not too many frills in a military wedding. (Our one and only splurge was a horse drawn carriage ride through the cemetary, just the two of us, after the ceremony. That was worth every penny we paid for it.)
Many of my college/grad school friends had big weddings. (NYTimes announcement big weddings…) They were super fun, but I liked my simple one better.
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What color was the horse?
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It’s not an ethnic tradition (we are both NYC WASPs, although with a big Scandinavian admixture), but we had a horse and carriage, with a white horse, to take us from the wedding to the reception. That was actually pretty fun, riding down Park Avenue in wedding clothes in an open carriage. Unless you win the World Cup or something, you will never be more loved by strangers than on the day you get married.
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I have a cousin who keeps draft horses. It’s become something of a minor family tradition for the bridal party to leave the church in a wagon pulled by a couple of his horses.
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You know, I have NO idea. You’d think I’d remember that. There were two, and I think they were brown. (pretty sure they weren’t white….I don’t recall seeing many white horses on base.)
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The Marines put on a nice show, what with the arch of crossed swords for the bride and groom to walk under. It’s also a beautiful uniform.
http://www.bridalguide.com/planning/wedding-ceremony-traditions/military-weddings-guide
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I’ll have to check and see if my daughter has horses listed on her Pinterest page (I suspect she does . . )
Do you all need to know the color too?
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The white horse (apparently it’s supposed to be a mare) tradition is the Baraat, the bridegroom’s wedding procession. The veiled groom is accompanied by his extended family to meet the bride.
I love that in that Monroeville, PA video, the horse’s owner is wearing Punjabi clothes.
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That’s a really white horse. I don’t think I’ve seen one that clean since the end of the Lord of the Rings.
But, there’s a giant Hindu temple in Monroeville. Also, the mall where they filmed the original Dawn of the Dead is in Monroeville. Plus, a whole different Hindu temple in the suburb up the road from Monroeville.
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That does explain the handler wearing traditional clothes. You can get a white horse in Charlotte, NC, too. In searching, I also found a very pretty white horse that does a pretty good job of bucking his rider off.
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I’m from South India and our weddings don’t involve the bridegroom riding in on a mare. But like most Indian weddings ours was large, not in the scale or grandeur of festivities, which were all religious and didn’t involve any alcohol, but in the number of guests. We are both the oldest children in our families and the extended families on all sides turned out fully: about 1000 guests in all I believe. This was 20 years ago,and in India, so probably didn’t cost as much as the article mentions, but yes, significant amt spent by both families. 2 day wedding, 2 receptions in India and one here in the US. And we still consider it a simple but well-conducted wedding 🙂
Like someone commented upthread, it’s the community aspect of it. And that it’s an opportunity for family to come together from all over (around the globe nowadays). I wouldn’t change any of it, except maybe the color of one of my reception saris 🙂
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I don’t think you can get my extended family together if they know there won’t be alcohol. Especially not for two days.
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An interesting cultural divide. I’ve seen it come up practically when people are trying to arrange cross-cultural events.
The affordability of a big person wedding goes way up if you’re not serving alcohol and also not serving meat.
In my parent’s home town, the tradition would, further, have been that anyone who wanted to would be served food at the wedding. Spouse saw an interesting extension of that tradition when a friend took him along to a wedding in Chennai (the 4+ million person city) where the family (wealthy, well-known) were following the same tradition. That was many years ago, though.
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Yes. The bar tab at my wedding was something in the range of a decent used car.
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Oh my. Our wedding was almost an afterthought in the process of moving to the States, starting grad school and getting, dare I say it, US citizenship for my husband. Certainly not as big of a party as the ones on kibbutz when the kids were born (uh, yes, 6 and 3 years before the wedding). Even my 50th birthday party was huge compared to the wedding, and in some ways, made up for it — dinner on a riverboat, 50 guests for the Labor Day weekend, with biking and many activities, dinners, fun and bonfires.
oh right, the wedding. Tucson municipality (beautiful building), 2 guests. Dress? $100 plus, as the salesperson awkwardly told me, the jacket was another $100. Pictures – we went to Sears. Dinner at Olive Garden. We’d had the wedding rings since a trip to Paris about ten years earlier. Honeymoon was in the graduate student dorms — we went to the guest room and our guests babysat.
What a day!
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I don’t think you can get my immediate family together if they know there won’t be alcohol!
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